So with this week, Shokugeki no Soma: Ni no Sara has come to an end. I do think last week’s episode was better, but this was still a satisfying episode to end the season with.

Plot

This week’s episode again takes place mainly at Shino’s Tokyo. Soma continues to absorb more knowledge about French cuisine, and he manages to get through the last day of the pre-open with no problems. Shinomiya closes his restaurant early on the last day, and invites a handful of special guests as the last customers of the night. These include mostly people associated with Totsuki Academy, but also Shinomiya’s mother.

After their meals are concluded, the restaurant shifts over to the cooking competition to decide on a new menu item. As I kind of expected, Shinomiya doesn’t compete, but instead participates as the judge. The participants in the competition include Soma, Abel, Lucie and, surprisingly, Wei as well. It turns out Wei is actually a chef (and used to be in the same position as Lucie), but she switched over to become the Service Manager in order to discover something new for her cooking.

For Soma’s dish, he takes inspiration from the oyakodon (chicken and egg rice bowl), and fashions it in the style of French cuisine. His dish contains a whole quail that he stuffs with eggs and risotto. He wraps all of these inner ingredients in cabbage in order to prevent them from leaking out of the quail meat while cooking. Out of all of the dishes Soma has made this season, I would say this one looked the most delicious.

Although Shinomiya isn’t a 100% satisfied with Soma’s dish, it nonetheless wins the competition and gets added to the menu. Shinomiya also gives Soma a few pointers on how he could improve the dish.

The rest of the episode shows some brief scenes of how the other students did with their training (they all seem to have passed), and their return to Totsuki Academy. During his absence, Soma has apparently become the number one person people want to challenge to a shokugeki. When he returns, he’s greeted by a box full of letters from students who want to challenge him.

The episode closes out with Soma defeating an older student in a shokugeki match and then offering to take on anybody else who wants to challenge him.

Comments

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I wonder how much thought the academy puts into where they assign each student for their training. On one hand, it’s a great opportunity to place each student in an environment that will help them develop the most. On the other hand, however, the training program is inherently unfair as the difference in the difficulty level can be quite drastic between different assignments (it’s especially unfair given that the students who fail have to leave the academy). I’m sure many of the students that did manage to pass their training would’ve failed if they were placed in Soma’s shoes and had to work under Shinomiya.

Rating

After finishing this season, I decided to rate this anime a 6/10. I know some people might think I’m rating it too low, but I rate the anime I watch much more harshly than the average viewer (to help illustrate this: my average rating for all the anime I’ve ever rated is around 5.5). So although my rating may look low, it isn’t a bad score. I enjoyed this season, more or less, and I thought it was good, but not great.

For comparison, I also rated the first season of Shokugeki no Soma a 6/10, although that’s not to say that I liked them equally. I think the first season of this series is the better of the two. I would’ve rated the first season a 7/10, but I had to dock one point from it for the excessive fan-service reactions (which, as you can guess, I do not like).

Next Season?

If I had to take a guess, I would say there’s a decent chance of another season getting made for this series due to how popular it seems to be. At the time of writing this review, however, there doesn’t appear to be any announcement for a new season yet.

As for when a new season may come out, it’s interesting to note that there was less than a year’s gap between the first and second seasons (the first season ended in September 2015, and the second began airing in July of this year). Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean a potential third season would follow this pattern as well, but it is a possibility. The timing will also depend on how much material of the original manga (which I’m not familiar with) is available to be adapted. We’ll just have to wait for an announcement.

If you’d like to share what you thought about the second season of Shokugeki no Soma, let us know in the comments below.